


Insufficient Data Coming Through

by UniverseOnHerShoulders



Series: Take Me To The Stars [21]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Loneliness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-08
Updated: 2019-06-08
Packaged: 2020-03-09 05:28:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18910504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UniverseOnHerShoulders/pseuds/UniverseOnHerShoulders
Summary: Graham tries to work out what to make of Missy.





	Insufficient Data Coming Through

Graham is, if he’s entirely honest, not sure what to make of this Missy character. The Doc seems determined to paint her as some kind of super-villainess, but the evidence for that seems kind of patchy, and besides, she doesn’t really _seem_ like the sort of woman to go around blowing up planets or trying to enslave entire races. She seems more like a Mary Poppins-type figure, although the one time he’d brought that up, the Doctor had affixed him with a stern glare and warned him not to mention it in front of Missy – something to do with copyright infringements and intellectual property – and so he’d lapsed into confused silence instead. 

If he’s honest, Missy seems kind of… lost. He recognises in her what he’d seen in himself before he met Grace; a desperate desire for acceptance and kinship, a feeling he had loathed in himself for betraying his own neediness for human contact, but in Missy, it seems… he doesn’t have the words for it. Evocative. Yearning. Desperate. He’s acutely aware that she’s dangerous, yes, because he’s seen the way she looks at anyone who isn’t the Doctor, or Clara, or the team, and he’s painfully aware she isn’t human, but he can see what she wants. She keeps turning up, after all; keeps inviting herself into their lives and appearing in the TARDIS like a bad penny, and he knows how it feels to simply be _wanted_. 

The Doctor seems to tolerate it, despite how often she tells Clara she doesn’t. He recognises that warm, empathic sense of kindness in his friend, and he loves her all the more for it. He’d seen in in Grace; seen the way she gravitated towards him with an open heart and a willingness to welcome him into her life. The Doctor might be lying to Clara about shields and strategies and avoidance tactics, but neither she nor Graham is buying it, and he’s sure that Clara knows that the Doctor’s commitment to avoiding Missy is paper-thin. She knows what Missy means to the Time Lady, and she… well, she tolerates it at best. There’s something there she knows not to challenge, or doesn’t want to challenge; an itch she’s afraid to scratch, and so Missy keeps popping up in their lives, and he keeps surveying her from afar. 

It’s difficult, trying to get the measure of her. The Doctor is careful to never leave her friends alone with Missy; she hovers over them like an over-protective parent, ever-watchful and ever-wary, determined not to let her oldest frenemy harm them. He settles for watching her from a distance; scrutinising how she interacts with each of them, especially the Doctor, and it becomes gradually apparent that her caustic nature is a mask for… well, loneliness. She’s abrasive and she’s rude and she makes strange comments about wanting to commit murder or eat them all for breakfast, but she’s like a child – she’s never had company; she’s never learnt to make friends; she’s never learnt the rules of social interaction. (Of course, part of Graham reasons that she might know; she might just be insane. The Doctor has sketched only the vaguest of vague pictures of Missy’s past, and so he has his doubts about the extent of her sanity, but he tries to give her the benefit of the doubt.) She wants to make friends; she charges boisterously about like an over-excitable child, throwing out remarks that land awkwardly and uncomfortably, and yet somehow… he still feels pity for her.

“You know,” Clara says to him one evening. They’re alone in the kitchen; he’d offered to make tea, and she’d followed him like a particularly unsubtle shadow, making some excuse about biscuits or chocolate or similar. “You shouldn’t pity Missy.” 

“I don’t,” he says at once; the lie slips off his tongue heavily and lands between them like a lead weight. “I mean…”

“She’s dangerous,” Clara warns him, folding her arms, and he’s reminded of the teacher she once was. “What Missy said to you, the first time she met you all? About everything she’s done to our planet? It’s true. She wasn’t being hyperbolic.” 

“I don’t…” he sighs, knowing that Clara is already well aware of his thoughts. “I don’t know, it just seems like too much to take in.” 

“Wouldn’t you say that about the Doctor, though? If you didn’t know her, you’d think everything about her seemed impossible to believe.”

“I suppose,” he shrugs noncommittally, pawing through cupboards in search of the teabags. “Missy is just…” 

“I don’t remember her turning us all into her own duplicates. The Doctor said that humanity has a great capacity for forgetting, and there was something so uniquely traumatic about it that it’s a collective memory-loss event. The same for what she did to the planet. You don’t remember, and nor do I, but the Doctor does, and she’s told me. Missy took over. She had a different name then, and a different face, but she enslaved the planet. Humanity became her slaves; her chain gangs. She kept people submissive and weak; she hypnotised everyone into doing her bidding. Do you remember Harold Saxon? Nice bloke. Seemed it, anyway.”

“Harold Saxon? Politician? Decent chap,” Graham fishes out five mugs and arranges them in a neat line. “I voted for him.”

“We all did, but that was Missy. That was how she took control. She used a signal, a sort of mass hypnosis, and she took over, and she did unspeakable things. She turned humanity – the future of humanity – into weaponised metal spheres, and she used them to commit mass genocide. She decimated huge swathes of the population. She did unspeakable things to the TARDIS. It was only because the Doctor was able to take back control that it was all undone; that’s why no one remembers. Quantum shifts and memory storms.”

“But still…” 

“You want to know why I loathe her?” Clara continues, her eyes burning with unshed tears, and Graham feels a sudden rush of fear. Clara Oswald does not cry. Clara Oswald is many things, but she has never cried in front of him so much as once, and he feels a rush of acute terror suddenly. Whatever could move her to tears is something to be feared, and he leans back against the counter, his task forgotten as he dedicates his attention solely to the woman in front of him. “She worked out a way to upload the consciousnesses of dead people to a computer, and then she turned their bodies into metal men. You haven’t seen them yet – Cybermen. They’re human shaped, yes, but their emotions are cut away, quite literally, and they’re put into metal suits and ordered to kill. They feel no remorse. They don’t remember being human. They just kill, and kill, and kill. I’ve faced them twice now, and they terrify me beyond belief… and she… and she…” 

Clara pauses and swipes a hand over her eyes, her cheeks tinged red with humiliation and pain. “I had a boyfriend, before the Doctor. His name was Danny Pink, and he was a good, kind man. He loved me very much, and I loved him very much, but I treated him very badly. And one day, whilst I was trying to make amends – whilst I told him I loved him, over the phone – he stepped into the road, and was knocked down by a car, and he was killed.”

“I’m sorry,” Graham murmurs, wanting to comfort Clara in some way but knowing she would be mortified by any overt displays of reassurance that might make overt the fact that he’d noticed she was crying. “Love, I’m sorry.” 

“He was killed, and she turned him into a metal man – a metal killing machine. He found me and he would’ve killed me, because he was programmed to do that. He would’ve executed me and thousands of others if he hadn’t been stopped by how much he loved me – some remnant of his former self; something he retained because… I don’t know, the process went wrong. So he didn’t kill me, and instead he sacrificed himself to save humanity.” 

“I’m sorry,” Graham says again, unable to find any more sincere sentiments. “Clara, I’m…” 

“And then we thought Missy was dead, until she made contact with some friends of mine and demanded to speak to me. She killed two of my security team for fun, and then we travelled to Skaro – the planet of the Daleks. You’ve met a Dalek; you’ve seen what it can do. She trapped me inside a Dalek’s shell, and then she lied to the Doctor, and tried to convince him to kill me. He pointed a gun at me while she laughed, and it was…” Clara shudders, her revulsion and residual horror almost tangible. “It was the most agonising thing I’ve ever experienced.”

“I didn’t realise…” 

“No, because she says she’s different now. After I died-”

Graham blinks hard at that, as he always does. Clara is so casual about mentioning her own death, and yet here she is, talking to him and walking around and saving the world. 

“-the Doctor rehabilitated her. I don’t know how much of that has remained with her. But be careful.”

“I will, love.” 

“I mean it. She’s dangerous, and she makes herself seem like an innocent victim, but she’s not.” 

“I understand, love,” Graham says seriously, and the kettle boils with a _click_. “Do… do you want a cup of tea?” 

It’s a simple enough offer, but Clara understands. 

“Yes,” she says gratefully, wiping her eyes on her sleeve. “Yes, please.”

 

* * *

 

Graham isn’t sure how it happens, really. There’s an explosion, and then there’s some smoke, and when it clears, he’s on his own in the rubble. He’s sure that the gang had been there a moment before, but now they’re not, and more worryingly, something is moving in the distance. He rubs at his eyes then squints, and the _something_ resolves itself in a woman in an aggressively purple suit he recognises all too well.

“Hello, dearie,” Missy trills, brushing a speck of dust off her voluminous skirt. “My, what a mess they’ve made of the place.” 

“Urm,” he’s not sure how to play this. She’s dangerous and he’s alone, and he remembers with a sudden rush of panic that she’s – literally – hypnotic. “So it seems. They’ve… they’ve ruined my good shoes.”

Missy blinks hard then looks down at his feet and lets out a peal of laughter. “What a shame,” she says with a disconcerting amount of sincerity. “Why don’t you come with me, and we’ll find your friends and get you a new pair? Possibly not in that order, and possibly not on this planet? Wouldn’t that be lovely, hmm?” 

“I don’t know about that,” Graham says as politely as possible, deciding on a survival strategy. “See, I couldn’t possibly go shopping with a lady as well-dressed as yourself without buying you dinner first. If you’re going to provide me with wonderful knowledge and erudite company, it would be only fair.”

Missy giggles. Graham is fairly sure super-villainesses aren’t supposed to giggle, but Missy _giggles_ , and he knows then that this is going to prove a successful tactic. “The Doctor never told me what charming friends she has,” she coos. “Why don’t we have dinner then? That would be awfully winsome.” 

“Grandad!” a voice calls from the darkness, and he feels his heart soar. “Where are you?” 

“Over here!” he shouts back, and Missy’s eyes widen, her finger coming to settle over her lips. He’s about to speak to her again when she tips him a conspiratorial wink, hits something on her wrist, and vanishes into thin air.

 

* * *

 

“Doc?” Graham asks one evening, leaning back in his armchair and surveying her with a curious look. The rest of the team have gone in search of food, and it’s just the two of them ensconced in his lounge. “Missy… she’s your friend, isn’t she?" 

“It’s complicated. Why?” 

“Because I think, more than anything, that what she needs is a friend.”

There’s a long silence as the Doctor contemplates his words. 

“I know,” she says finally. “I’m trying.”


End file.
